To be totally honest, I started a number of entries today on other subjects, but none of them went anywhere. Usually, if I force myself, I can get somewhere, even if it's not my ideal or imagined destination, but today? Nothing. Bubkes.
I think it is fair to allow myself participation in the first example of collective anxiety I can remember. At least I cannot deny that I am feeling it--not anxiety, exactly, as I am feeling pretty confident that this election will go the way I want it to, but an intense distraction and even edginess, as though I am waiting for life-changing news, which I guess in a way, I am.
The truth is, I am finding this collective emotion thing rather inspiring. After 9/11, I suppose, I felt part of a larger group, connected to the people around me and around my city in a different way. But the event itself was so finite, so awful, so impossible to process in the immediate days after it happened, that I can't say I felt caught up in a collective response, which would have had to be rage? Intense sorrow? At least at first, nothing good. Later, there was a sense I know was shared by others of newfound commitment to the belief system and liberties we take for granted--which actually may have something to do with the way people are responding to this election--but not a movement, a tidal wave of effort and determination and perseverance the likes of which I have never actually seen. Until now.
Today, I will confess, I had a weak moment. I was riding on the subway, and I was late for my next appointment, and hungry, and disgruntled. I had finished my book, so busied myself studying the faces of the other people on the subway car, as surreptitiously as I could. There was a woman seated across from me who looked pretty downtrodden. Not homeless: she had a jacket and a handbag, but bone-tired, with worry lines deep in her brow. Her clothes were shabby, and when she pulled an envelope out of her pocket, I noticed she was sorting coupons, which I don't think I have ever seen anyone do here in New York.
And for a sour, bitter, low, low moment, I thought to myself, and I do feel as though I am confessing here, So what? Why, really, should this woman care? The truth is, this won't change her life at all.
I don't know what changed in me, why when the woman got off the subway and walked away, to a life I actually know nothing about, I didn't feel this anymore. Nothing had happened; it was a thought, it had occurred to me, and then been whisked away for no apparent reason. I didn't even have to talk myself out of it: I simply didn't believe it anymore, or think it true, and I was relieved.
Because at heart, at the very core of the things I believe, is that we must think things are possible, for the people they are actually possible for, and for the people they are most likely not. For when we give up hope for the downtrodden, the struggling, the least fortunate among us, we give up hope for us all.
So tonight, I go to sleep thinking this, and believing it, as profoundly as I have ever believed anything before: Tomorrow, the world is going to change. Not just because we will be electing a new president, and he will be a good president, a brave president, a brilliant and thoughtful and empathetic president, but because for the first time in my life I have felt the power of what we can do when we do it together, part of a groundswell of change. Dare I say it? Part of the very best parts of the human race.
3 comments:
Good luck to us all tomorrow! Dear Niece Amy, I feel like we have come full circle -- from the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention where my contemporaries were beat up in Grant Park -- to Barack Obama's election tomorrow and his hopeful speech in that same Grant Park. Finally. This will be the first time I'll vote for a president I believe in who will win. How wonderful that you feel part of this change, and I feel that history will be catching up with the best of the '60s.
There are times that shake me out of what I am ashamed to admit is my complacency--and this morning was one of them. Breakfast conversation involved a casual dialogue with my daughter about the mock election at her high school yesterday. Then we packed up to leave for the day, dropped her off at school, and I swung by the town hall to cast my own ballot. I didn’t have to fight to vote, (although the line was the longest ever) or do it in secret, or feel afraid for my life. I chatted with my neighbors, delighted that in our small town, my precinct had the shortest line. As I grasped my black pen and started filling in the dots, a swelling pride blossomed. Here we are, citizens of huge and culturally diverse country, with a vast range of beliefs, ethnicities, standards, and economic levels, yet we all expect to come together in this same way on this same day and mark our individual choices. Perhaps it is the historic nature of this election that hit me, but I thought about this all the way to work. November 4, 2008--a typical day in a democratic nation-- voting as a matter of right, voting as a matter of course, an act that I regularly take for granted--except for today, when for these few hours, I’m not.
I just got back from voting and it was an amazing feeling. This was my first election where I actually had to wait online. We were there an hour but it was completely worth it. All of us talking and feeling, dare I say it, hopeful. Feeling like we were part of a community. Taking the time to chat with our neighbors. Feeling the historic nature of the moment. Never has it felt so good to cast a vote.
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